Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda's (b. 1983) paintings are intricate, meditative compositions that blur the boundaries between mnemonic and imaginative registers. His evocative landscapes are more a product of a state of mind than depictions of particular locales. As he has noted, "The only reason to call my works landscapes is cultural—it’s simply that viewers automatically register my format as a landscape, although none of the images can be traced to a geographic location. It's the idea of landscape as a structure, rather than a real place."¹

Arruda's seascapes (such as the present work) and junglescapes are characterized in particular by their subtle rendition of light. Created on prepared surfaces, they involve a reductive process wherein the impression of light emerges from the subtraction of paint. Devoid of specific reference points, the seascapes are all grounded by only horizon lines, fluctuating between abstraction and figuration. Charged atmospheric conditions engage further dichotomies between sky and earth, the ethereal and the solid, the metaphysical and the visual. Through his evocative and textured brushwork, Arruda foregrounds the materiality and physicality of paint, while also recalling the genre's historical associations with the Romantic sublime.

¹The artist cited in Angeria Rigamonti di Cutò, "Lucas Arruda: 'The only reason to call my works landscapes is cultural,'" studiointernational.com (September 19, 2017).